is music too middle class?
- Thread starter rubberdingyrapids
- Start date
john eden
male pale and stale
I don't agree.
What about music which originates in, and expresses, the nature of working class existence?
Quite clearly Prince Andrew can go off and hire a recording studio and make the best grime record known to man with the right training and assistance.
But music is more than one individual arranging a series of noises in the correct order - it is part of a wider cultural sphere, which is originates in local or global society.
So perhaps Hugh Laurie can make amazing Blues records (perhaps). But this ignores where the Blues as a genre "comes from".
Joey Joe-Joe Jr. Shabadoo
Well-known member
well i liked what you said, Bruno
music, or good music, should be a huge thing. cosmic. and when you look at things from that big picture perspective, who gies a fuck about what university your dad went to.
music, or good music, should be a huge thing. cosmic. and when you look at things from that big picture perspective, who gies a fuck about what university your dad went to.
john eden
male pale and stale
I think there is a peculiar problem with credibility when you're into specific music/culture in your twenties/thirties.
I've met loads of people doing amazing stuff who it later turned out where public school educated or whatever. It used to do my head in because I could never figure out how some people seemed to be able to support themselves when all they did was make marginal art.
People like particular musics because they are exciting (exotic, I guess) and energetic and there is this view that you're not authentic unless you've toiled down t'pit or grew up on a council estate.
So people who grew up fairly comfortably in the home counties tend to try and obscure this. It's the same with some middle class football fans as far as I can tell.
I probably suffered from this a bit myself, but I think was always clear that I wasn't actually part of any of these scenes anyway.
When I met David Keenan he said he was into all this weird improv music precisely because he grew up in working class culture and hated it so much. The irony of certain Oxbridge types slagging him off for liking "elitist" music was not lost on him.
rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
ideally, nationality, race, class, ethnicity, locale (doesnt this board go on a bit about cities?) would all play no part in how we view the music, cos its all just music right? but it seems like there are some things people are fine with using to judge an artist/genre more than others. i wouldnt ever want to just box someone in purely or reduce them down to a few tick boxes, but all these factors cant help but play a part imo (to varying levels admittedly) and cant just be wished away sadly. eg - jamaican music cant just be magically separated from its origins. but maybe thats easier to acknowledge cos no one on this board is from there, whereas talking about class in relation to british pop or london/uk dance music means we have to think about stuff closer to home.
all that debate years back about hipsters and their snotty ironic appreciation of things like ghetto house - thats a lot to do with class if you ask me.
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SecondLine
Well-known member
If you take away all the 'non-musical' elements of music, what do you have left? fuck all. This myth that music is 'just music' and that the grounded/'real-life' factors which shape it can, and should, be ignored is a harmful thing which mostly supports/facilitates misinterpretation, misappropriation etc.
When music enables people to 'transcend' real world conditions - as with, say, early house music, where you have this space of empowerment and freedom of expression for (mostly) non-white gays - it's for very specific reasons to do with its context. Not just cos the kickdrum is some cosmic force of unification.
So in an ideal world, yes, class wouldn't matter in music. But that's cos class wouldn't exist, not just cos we got better at ignoring it.
D
droid
Guest
Without class and class conflict there would be almost no music worth listening to anyway.
UFO over easy
online mahjong
sorry dude, but saying that "class is meaningless" and that "lower class" people can "transcend" their "social standing" through music sets off some pretty loud alarm bells.
shabadoo said:
no matter how cosmic or grandiose your music might be, it's still written by, consumed by and distributed by people in the real world rather than some beautiful utopia where class suddenly has no relevance or impact
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Joey Joe-Joe Jr. Shabadoo
Well-known member
seems to be a uniquely british obsession though
SecondLine
Well-known member
People in the US repeatedly claim that class "doesn't exist" there, and they have one of the most stratified, socially immobile societies in the west.
Obviously in the UK we have a lot of cultural baggage when it comes to class, but that also means we have developed, over the years, the tools to discuss & address it - better that than labour under the misapprehension that the people on the bottom rung only have themselves to blame for being there, right?
comelately
Wild Horses
Gangnam Style is kind of about class, so I don't think it's uniquely British.
Joey Joe-Joe Jr. Shabadoo
Well-known member
bet you an american has never asked 'is music to middle class?'
Joey Joe-Joe Jr. Shabadoo
Well-known member
did you enjoy my poem
rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
i thought the general consensus was that americans obsess over race, brits obsess over class.
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
I think the ENTIRE COUNTRY MUSIC INDUSTRY would tell you to speak for yourself.
We definitely have a class obsession with culture, but the thing is, we've actually turned our classes INTO a race or culture. Like, you have people here in Pennsylvania, which is a northern state, and with a definite industrial economy, yet if people are not directly in a factory based town, they become obsessed with notions of Americana/Blue Collarism. Springsteen for example, lives in a middle-class community, I ran into him at a grocery store when he was in front of me in a line. Yet to Americans, he symbolizes this 'working class'. Then again, a lot of the people who believe themselves to be middle class in USA are dead-wrong, so there you go.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
John Lennon, anyone?
SecondLine
Well-known member
Bit of a false binary dontchu think? Plenty of music made by rootless suburbanites that doesn't quite have the non-place shopping mall quality of an x factor hit. Not all of it's necessarily bad.
